Court Enters Judgment against Three Wall Street Brokers for Defrauding Customers

The Honorable John F. Keenan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York entered judgments against defendants Marek Leszczynski, Benjamin Chouchane and Henry Condron (collectively, the "brokers") in the SEC's fraud case against the listed defendants.

The SEC charged the brokers, who formerly worked on the cash desk at a broker-dealer firm, with illegally overcharging customers $18.7 million by using hidden markups and markdowns and secretly keeping portions of profitable customer trades. The fraudulent charges involved more than 36,000 transactions during a four-year period. The SEC stated that the brokers made their scheme difficult for customers to detect because they deceptively charged the markups and markdowns during times of market volatility in order to conceal the fraudulent nature of the prices they were reporting to their customers.

The SEC stated that the defendants acknowledged the facts to which they admitted as part of their guilty pleas in parallel criminal cases.

See: SEC Litigation Release.Related news: SEC Charges Four Brokers with Defrauding Customers in $18.7 Million Scheme (October 5, 2012).